


in the wrong trouser of time

by ficlicious



Series: Tumblr Prompts & Ficlets [6]
Category: Avengers Academy (Video Game), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: AU mashup, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Crack, Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Author Is Sleep Deprived, Crack Crossover, Enabled By Readers, I Blame Tumblr, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, The Author Regrets Nothing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-04-26
Updated: 2016-04-26
Packaged: 2018-06-04 14:22:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6662344
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ficlicious/pseuds/ficlicious
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Avengers find themselves locked up in a mysterious place, with no memory of how they got there or who kidnapped them. Figuring the answers out is definitely a priority, but one problem stands in their way: </p><p>Not one of them is from the same reality as the others.</p>
            </blockquote>





	in the wrong trouser of time

**Author's Note:**

> Title cheerfully swiped from Terry Pratchett, the king of crack fiction.
> 
> Enabled by The Usual Suspects, after [this tumblr post](http://mystillyoungself-ficlicious.tumblr.com/post/143303754341/spent-the-last-few-hours-rereading-some-of-my).
> 
> I regret nothing. 
> 
> Toni Stark: The Stars Through Her Soul (Stars Verse)  
> Clint Barton: Radioactive AU (Remix Verse)  
> Steve Rogers: Canvas, Ink & Paint (Ink Verse)  
> Bucky Barnes: Immortals (Immortal Verse) [[Premise Here]](http://mystillyoungself-ficlicious.tumblr.com/post/143160893186/medieisme-mystillyoungself-ficlicious).  
> Thor Odinson: Avengers Academy AU (AvAcAU Verse)  
> Bruce Banner: Avengers Assemble AU (AvAsAU Verse)  
> Natasha Romanoff: Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU Verse)
> 
> Some of my AUs are not available yet, because I haven’t finished the fics. Others are slight departures.

**Toni & Clint**

Toni regains consciousness, and immediately regrets it. Everything hurts, with the dull, achy feeling of having slept in the armor after being punched through a building by Banner at his most rage-monstery. She wishes she could say that never happened, but it’s a feeling she’s intimately familiar with.

She’s not in the armor, though, just the skintight flight suit she wears underneath. Even without having to check, she knows all her tech is gone: she can’t feel the earpiece in her ear anymore, the tight grips of the sheaths strapping slender combat knives to the inside of her thigh and underside of her arm are absent, and she can’t feel the weight of her bracelets on either arm.

 _Wonderful_.

She lays still, keeping her breathing even and her eyes closed, and tries to suss out where the everliving hell she is by listening to the way the sounds echo. As best she can tell, she’s on a cot or a thin mattress, in a small room, and it’s either nighttime, or the room doesn’t get a lot of natural light. Everything is screaming “dungeon” to her, even though being in a dungeon makes absolutely no sense.

She forces herself to sit up, despite her bruised and protesting muscles. With her eyes open, she discovers that she was right on the money: stone walls, high slits for windows, heavy barred door. Dungeon.  And she’s not alone. There’s a soft underlayer of another person’s breathing, the whisper of clothing on skin, the almost-silent creak of leather. A second cot a few feet away, against the far wall, with a huddled heap wearing Kevlar and combat-rated boots and archery bracers.

Well, at least she’s got someone here who has her back. That’s a plus.

“Clint,” she hisses, or tries to. Her throat is so dry, it’s an unintelligble croak. She licks her lips, swallows painfully a couple of times, and clears her throat before trying again. “Clint!” For a long moment, there’s no reply, and Toni’s heart skips a few panicked beats. “ _Clint_!”

The pile of human shifts and stirs, and his soft groan of misery has her sighing in a rush of relief. “… Toni?” comes Clint’s hazy, befuddled voice. “Izzat you?”

“Yeah, s’me,” she replies, licking her dry lips again and grimacing with the effort of swinging her legs off the cot and getting her feet on the floor. It takes entirely too much time and muscle power to get on her feet, but she manages it with only a minimum of groaning. “I swear to Christ, if this is von Doom again, I’m going to stuff that obnoxious green cape down his fucking throat.”

“Right there with you, honey,” Clint grumbles hoarsely, picking himself off his cot and turning to face Toni. Blood mats his hair and has dried onto his temple, and he looks about as thrilled to be conscious as she feels. “You can make me arrowheads that’ll cut through his metal-plated ass, right?”

There’s something niggling at the back of her head, something uneasy crawling down her spine. There’s something wrong with this picture, something wrong with the way he’s sitting or the way his hair is, or the colors of his suit, but she ignores it. Chalks it up to head trauma and chronic exhaustion and criminal undercaffeination. “Yeah. Think I can whip something out of my box of scraps for you. Titanium, vibranium, or adamantium?”

“Adamantium. Always adamanti—” His face suddenly goes blank, and he stills, halfway twisted towards her. Toni knows him well enough to recognize his tells. Wary, caged, cornered. Ready to attack.

She takes a half step backwards. “What are you—” Her words die in her throat as he finishes turning towards her, and she catches sight of his blended soulmark, indelibly displayed on his bare right shoulder. The familiar violet arrowhead isn’t new. She’s seen it a thousand times, used the nano veil to wear it for awhile.

The blue circle with the hollow, inverted triangle, nestled inside the arrowhead,  on the other hand… That’s _brand_ spanking new.

“Clint, why do you have my mark?” she asks warily, the exact same time he asks in the same tone, “Toni, why do you have an arc reactor in your chest?”

They stare at each other for a long, long time. “You’re not Toni,” Clint finally says, even though clearly she is.

“Well, you’re not Clint,” Toni shoots back, even though clearly he is.

They go back to staring at each other for awhile. The silence is tense, uncomfortable, stretching for far too long.

They have protocols for this sort of thing, don’t they? Does Bizarro Clint have it too? Only one way to find out. “December 14th,” Toni blurts. “1998.”

Clint’s shoulders ease, and strain visibly drains out of his face. “The gym in the Malibu mansion,” he replies, and smiles, though he still looks a touch uncertain. “Alternate realities?”

Toni nods, brain spinning and whirling, still trying to wrap around the fact that Clint is not Clint, but he’s still Clint. _More coffee required_ , she thinks. _Gallons_ of it. “Has to be. We’re soulmates in yours?”

He blinks. “We’re not in yours?”

She shakes her head, but can’t help the small smile that curves her mouth. “No,” she admits. “But that’s never really mattered with you and me. I do have soulmates, though.” She fumbles with the fastening on her right shoulder, pulls the flight suit material down to show off her own blended soulmark, the double stars snugged in the blue circle.

Both of Clint’s eyebrows shoot into his hairline, and he whistles softly. “Jesus fucking Christ, babe. Capsicle _and_ Frosty the Killbot? You can’t ever do anything easy, can you?”

It’s not her Clint, but he’s a Clint and one close enough to hers that it’s automatic to snappily reply, “You’re plenty easy, I’ll have you know. Flash you a smirk and a flip of the hair, and your interest is child’s play to catch.”

His return grin is wicked. “Glad to know I’m consistent across the realities,” he says modestly.

_**oOoOoOo  
** _ **Steve**

Steve gradually becomes aware he’s sprawled on a cold, hard, stone floor, cheek pressed against a groove between panels. His head is fuzzy, and throbs in a way that worries him, since he hasn’t had a headache in about seventy years. The fact that his waking is gradual, and not instantaneous is also distantly worrisome, since he’s taken special care to condition himself to go from soundly sleeping to wide-awake in a couple of seconds.

He takes stock while he’s still lying on the floor, and catches hushed whispering from a short distance away. Every muscle tenses instinctively, preparing to leap to his feet and fight for his life. Subtly, he flexes his wrists, ankles, knees and hips, but detects no rope or other kind of binding restraining him.

“… has a _dick_ on his face!” one voice, female, whispers furiously. The other voice, familiar, cackles quietly. “Who the hell draws dicks on their own faces?”

In a single, athletic motion, he has his feet under him, crouched for an instant before standing upright, getting a good look at his captors. Well, fellow detainees, he supposes. Barton and a black-haired woman, sitting back to back, Barton facing the tiny window in the dungeon room, the woman facing the door. Both their heads turn to him when he leaps to his feet.

“The kind with juvenile soulmates,” Steve says, trying for that deceptively casual tone Tony’s perfected, but getting a strained, tight quality instead. He scans quickly for any of his gear, his shield. He’s wearing his uniform, the shield should be with it. But he doesn’t see it anywhere. “You should know, Hawkeye. You helped him do it.”

Barton and the woman pause, glance over their shoulders at each other, and the woman grins and turns sideways. “It does sound like something you would do.”

Barton’s return smile can only be described as shit-eating. “That’s three for three,” he says gleefully. “I love being me.”

“You’re such an asshole,” the woman grumbles.

“And yet you put up with me. Really says something about you, doesn’t it?”

Steve’s lips thin and he sets his hands on his hips. “At least one of you is an Avenger,” he says firmly, injecting lots of Captain America into his words, and both heads snap to him again. “Miss, I’m sorry to drag you into the middle of this, but I really need a sitrep of current events, and a summary of how this happened before we can formulate a plan to get out of it.”

Barton and the woman trade long, significant looks. “I guess other things are consistent too,” Barton mutters under his breath.

The woman shakes her head. “Listen, honeybunch,” she drawls. “I may respond very well to your Captain America Is In Charge voice, but only under certain situations. And since we aren’t getting our asses reamed by Chitauri, and I don’t see any ball gags and manacles, you’re just shit out of luck.” She beams brightly, and the intonation, the words, the smirk is so familiar, Steve physically reels backwards on his feet. “So I love you, Steve, really honey, I do. But fuck your crossed arms and your annoyed frown. I’m not in the mood.”

“I learn new things about my wife every day,” Barton says casually, leaning back against the wall and crossing his arms behind his head. “Ball gags, manacles, and the pinched look of Captain America’s too-small tighty-whities does it for her in the bedroom.”

Steve stares at the woman, mouth agape and eyes wide, as his mind makes the connections and the leaps, changes the planes of her face, the length of her hair, the delicacy of her cheekbones and eyebrows. Adds facial hair, scars, business casual attire. A band tee shirt and faded jeans. Imagines the half-awake expression hovering over the steam of piping hot coffee.

She scoffs, eyes on Barton. “Really, Clint. If you haven’t figured any of that shit out by now, you need to find a new code name. Mole-eye, maybe. I pity your Toni. Wait til age starts creeping up on you and you’re not so circus-bendy anymore. See how thrilled she is with your personality then.”

“Shrew,” Barton says.

“Amateur,” she says back.

“I never miss!”

“I’ve seen better.”

“Oh yeah? Name ‘em.”

“There’s this one guy, freaking _amazing_. He goes by Tricks—”

“Don’t you say it!” Barton yelps. “Don’t you _dare_!”

Steve’s head is throbbing again, quickly ramping up into pounding like hammers. He puts a hand to his temple and grits his teeth. “ _Avengers_!” he says loudly, desperate for them to shut up for five seconds and let him process this. Barton and the woman both turn attentive, innocent faces to him, falling as quiet as church mice, and it’s terrifying how synchronized that was. He resolves right then and there to never, ever, _ever_ again complain about Bucky and Clint’s constant squabbling and prank wars, because Tony and Clint are _so_ _much worse._

“Tony,” he says firmly, eyes on the woman, though he feels it’s the least firm thing in his mind. There’s still a hint of question pitching the end of the name upwards

The woman’s gaze softens a little, and she gives him a sad smile. “Yeah, Cap,” she says gently, and turns to uncover the shine of the arc reactor from under the blackout panel on her flight suit. The way the blue light paints her face from beneath makes her resemble Tony so much for just a moment, it stalls his heart. “I’m Toni Stark. Just not your Tony Stark. I’m sure she — he? — is perfectly fine in whatever reality you came from.”

“I’m not from either of your realities either, apparently,” Barton puts in. “Since the Toni Stark I know doesn’t have a nightlight in her chest and you don’t look nearly brooding enough to be the Steve “Sulk On Cue and Angst On Legs” Rogers I know.”

Steve folds his arms and leans against the wall, thoughtful and honestly, still reeling a tiny bit. He’s not going to be able to call her _Toni_ , he knows that right away. She’s going to have to be content with Stark, at least from him. “How long have you been here?”

Stark shakes her head. “I don’t know, Cap,” she says. “I woke up, no armor, no weapons, no tech, no gear. I don’t remember what I was doing before I woke up. Everything’s pretty fuzzy for the last 24 hours or so.”

“Toni was awake before I was,” Barton says. “And it’s the same deal. Even my boot knife is gone, so whatever they did grabbed everything but our clothes. Last thing I remember is being on the Helicarrier. Then…” He shrugs. “Nothing til here.”

None of that is reassuring information. “Have either of you heard from your home realities?” he asks, looking up in time to see them both shaking their heads.

“Trust me,” Barton says with an indelicate snort, “if Toni had a way to reach me, she’d have the barriers between dimensions ripped to shreds by now. She doesn’t like it when people take her stuff.”

“Woman after my own heart,” Stark says approvingly. “Steve and Bucky and Other You and Tash are going to kill into little pieces whoever snatched me up.”

Steve scratches the back of his head, trying not to be too weirded out by the notion of meeting himself, or of someone else talking about a him that’s not him in ways that he would act. “I can’t imagine that Bucky and Tony are doing any different,” he admits, but because he’s pragmatic and doesn’t pull punches, adds, “If they realize I’m gone. It’s not like there aren’t shapeshifters and nanotech disguises in the world. Well,” he amends, “my world, anyway.”

From the unpleasant looks of surprise that go across Barton’s and Toni’s faces, that’s something that’s also known in their worlds, and it’s definitely something they hadn’t considered.

“Fuck,” Barton says, quiet and fervent.

**oOoOoOo**

**Bucky & Thor**

Bucky hits the floor hard, skids on her knees, and comes up with teeth bared and fists up. She hears the denim part with a long, ripping tear as her knee scrapes across something, and she spits something vile and creative, because those were her _favorite fucking jeans_ , so she looks around for something to hit.

There’s nothing but a couple of shitty-looking cots and a door that, once she gets in one solid punch, she’s not sure she’d be able to break it down. It’s just her, four walls, growing frustration, and an unbreakable connection to endless wells of God of War feels. Or, as the others would put it “a surefire path that can only end in calamity and tears”.

That village full of idiots deserved the volcano. That’s all she’s got to fuckin’ say about it.

She paces the confines of the room, restless and  snarling. She’s never done well with enforced solitude, less so since spending all that time on ice over the last hundred years. In moments like these, she knows how those animals in zoos go from placid one day to murder spree the next. Add that to the fact that the only weapon she has besides herself is the arm Toni made her, and she’s more irritated than usual. _No one_ takes her weapons. Well, and lives to tell the tale, anyway.

It only takes seven long-strided laps around the walls of the room for her patience to snap. As she passes the solid wooden door again, she spins, using the momentum to punch the wood hard enough to make it rattle on its hinges. Impressive door, if she’s being appreciative. There aren’t many things that spell-forged titanium can’t plow through. She’s punched giant trees, concrete bunkers and the odd hostile tank into splinters with it, even put a couple of dents in the Destroyer once.

Apparently this door is made of adamantium, vibranium or star-metal, cos it ain’t budging an inch.

She slams her fist into the door again, kicks it for good measure. “Hey!” she yells, glaring up at the ceiling, turning slowly in one spot with her fists clenched at her sides. There’s got to be cameras or something here somewhere, she figures. “I wanna see whatever one’a you cockgoblins kidnapped me! We’re gonna have words! And yours are gonna be _ow_ an’ _i’m sorry_ an’ _please don’t hurt me anymore_!”

She waits, but there’s only silence. She’s not surprised that there’s no answer. She hasn’t gotten one to date, no matter how many epithets she screams.

“Fuckin’ cowards,” she mutters, and goes back to pacing. She loses track of how many times she circles the room, pausing only to issue another direct hit to the door, a continuous attempt to weaken it enough for her to escape. It doesn’t seem to be working  — the door is just as strong when she stops as it was when she starts, every single time — but it makes her feel like she’s doing more than sitting on her ass and waiting for the others to pull her bacon out of the fire.

——-

She doesn’t remember falling asleep, which means she didn’t do it on purpose. She bolts from unconsciousness with wordless shout, launched out of bed on sheer instinct and lifetimes of muscle memory. She strikes at her assailant before she even registers she has one, knocking the hand away from her shoulder with her natural arm and socking them in the face with her metal one

Her attacker is a blur of fleshtones and flashing metallics, large and bulky and muscular, and their cry of surprise is definitely male and startlingly familiar. She’s not as quick on the uptake as Steve or Toni, and definitely not before she’s even fully awake. As she tries to identify where she’s heard that particular voice before, it yells something angry and not English, and suddenly Bucky’s flying across the room.

She twists like a cat, gets herself straightened out a second before she hits the wall and manages to lead with her feet instead of her head. She lands in what has to be a perfect, kinetics-dispersing crouch Toni would tear up with pride at seeing her do. But Bucky’s not in the mood for that right now. She’s in the mood to kick ass, take names, and bury bodies.

She kicks off the wall, yelling something equally angry and not English in response, and is halfway back to her attacker when she realizes it’s Thor Odinson.Rage throbs behind her eyeballs, tight and scalding, the way it always gets when her favorite Loki apologist pops up out of nowhere to fuck with her day. Her jaw clenches until her teeth start hurting, and her fist balls until her skin is marble-white.

“You’ve got a lot of fuckin’ nerve, Odinson!” she yells, pushing all her momentum behind a vicious side-kick aimed at Thor’s head, which he barely dodges. His eyes are wide, astonished, without recognition. She throws a flurry of punches, most of which are dodged or blocked, but the last one connects with a solid _thud_ and a grunt of pain that satisfies something dark and visceral in her head.

Thor grunts again, catches her wrists, and throws her backwards a couple of stumbling paces. “Hold!” he says, raising both of his hands palm-out in a peace gesture. “Peace, friend! I mean you no harm!”

She catches herself before she hits the wall again, and glares at him. “Yeah, well, what if I mean you harm, huh? I told you what would happen if you showed up without that douchebag brother of yours in tow to pay for what he did!”

Thor blinks at her, clearly confused.  “I don’t understand,” he says, a baffled frown pulling his eyebrows together. “Have we met before?”

That, if nothing else, freezes her cold, and she eyes him for a long moment. “You must be smoking the funny plants up in Asgard, Odinson,” she finally manages to get out. “You don’t recall your douchebag brother opening a giant portal in the sky above Avengers Tower and letting a buncha blue-skinned wannabe fuckin’ world conquerors pour into Midtown?”

“I’m afraid I have no knowledge of the events of which you speak, nor do I have any memory of our acquaintance.”

If this were Loki, Bucky knows she’d never be able to trust a word, gesture or expression. But the Odinson isn’t so full of guile as his brother. So when Odinson looks deeply confused and lost for context, Bucky’s pretty sure she can rely on it to be the truth.

Still, it’s a little hard to swallow. The Avengers might attempt to have as little to do with Asgardians as they can, but Thor’s a regular visitor to New York, and they end up running into him a lot. Bucky finds it just a tad bit unreal that he can’t seem to remember any of it. “Amora and the Executioner in Central Park? Doombots on the Brooklyn Bridge? MODOK’s army of mind-control bugs. Dragon in the middle of fuckin’ Grand Central Station? Any’a this ringing bells, Sparky?”

“No, I’m afraid not,” Odinson says pleasantly, then grins. “But they sound like _glorious_ battles.” He claps her on the shoulder with enough strength to nearly drive her to her knees. “I am thrilled a version of me managed to participate in them, and with such worthy opponents and allies!”

“You Asgardians are fuckin’ weird, when you’re not genocidal,” Bucky grumbles, and then her brain finishes processing what he said. Her shoulders slump and she gets a sinking feeling in her stomach, the same kind of feeling she gets when Toni gets a certain gleam in her eye and says _hey guys, I just had the most brilliant idea_. “Wait, whaddya mean, a _version_ of you?”

Thor’s grin turns sympathetic. “Tis the only explanation,” he says. “For I have no idea who you are, friend, but you are plainly acquainted with me. As the Tonies would say, when one eliminates the impossible, whatever left must be the truth.”

Bucky actually has heard Toni say that, but that doesn’t make it true. She considers for a moment, then shrugs. It’s reckless and impatient and probably more than a little foolish to trust Thor here, but hey. She learned from the best reckless impatient fool on all Olympus. Ares has only himself to blame. “Alternate realities,” she says, an eyebrow up and skeptical.

“Were it my home reality,” Odinson says with equanimity, “I could simply call for Heimdall and open the Bifrost, but alas, I do not feel that will work. The energy here feels different, as though the air were unknown to me. There are many paths through Yggdrasil, and not all of them lead to the Nine Worlds we know. Some of them lead into many other worlds, which is where I think we find ourselves now. Somewhere through the winding trails, our paths intersected with each other and with a new reality, and here we are.”

It’s a better theory than anything she’s come up with so far, which is a big fat _zero_ for all the time she’s been pacing and punching things. Even if she thinks it’s more likely Loki got into Odinson’s head and fucked with it a bit, she may as well at least entertain the possibility. Hell, it’s not like she doesn’t have the time. Where the fuck else is she going to go?

“You look as strong as our Odinson, at least” she says. “Come help me try to punch this door offa the hinges. It’s challenging me.”

“If there’s one thing I appreciate,” Odinson says, shedding his cape and mail sleeves, “it is a challenge. Do you have a name, friend?”

Bucky stares, shakes her head and says shortly, “Bucky. Bucky Barnes. In Asgard, you know me as Bia Styxdottir.”

Thor’s face doesn’t shift an iota, which goes a long way towards convincing Bucky that he really doesn’t remember a thing, lending more credence to his many worlds theory. “And which do you prefer?” he asks politely.

Despite herself, one side of Bucky’s mouth pulls upwards in a grin. “None of you assholes have ever asked me that before,” she says, turning to face the door and pulling her fist back in preparation for a punch. “Call me Bucky. Alla my friends do.”

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me [on tumblr](http://mystillyoungself-ficlicious.tumblr.com/), where WIP chapters and ficlets and the like are posted well ahead of when they show up here.


End file.
